14 DAY TRIAL // With Windows 8 still in development, Microsoft detailed some aspects of the evolution of the operating system, especially around customization.
Offered as a Developer Preview, Windows 8 Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is less focused on user experience scenarios, with the company promising to deliver even more personalization options than are currently available to early adopters.
Marina Dukhon, a senior program manager lead on the Core Experience team, revealed some of the additional customization functionality coming to the Start Screen in Windows 8.
“A good deal of obvious extensibility was intentionally omitted from the Developer Preview and will be there in the final product—colors and backgrounds, for example,” Dukhon said.
But at the same time, users will be permitted to customize much more than just the surface of the Start Screen.
The personalization functionality that Windows 8 will end up bringing to the table is designed to enhance the level of control that users have over the Start Screen beyond anything that was available with the old Start Menu design.
“The personalization of the Start screen is one of the features that we want to make great, and we’re still iterating on it and to make it better. In the Windows Developer Preview, you can already try flexible group sizes, unpinning tiles, and resizing wide tiles to square tiles,” Dukhon added.
“And in the Beta, you’ll also be able to use other improvements based on this dialog, in addition to creating, naming, and rearranging groups.”
It appears that Windows 8 Beta will be a release targeted at a much broader audience compared to the Developer Preview.
Even the official label slapped on top of Windows 8 Build 8102 M3 is designed to keep end users at bay. But in all fairness, Windows 8 still requires some work before average consumers can start using the OS.
One example of Start Screen customization that the software giant already demoed by did not include in the Windows Developer Preview is dubbed group rearranging.
Windows 8 allows users to create collections of app tiles on the Start Screen, to name groups, and even to move entire sets of items to a different location.
“The Developer Preview was obviously incomplete in this regard, and given the importance we attach to this, we fully expect to land on a solution that combines flexibility with overall improvement that justifies the change from previous products,” Dukhon explained.
“The ability to put apps where you want them in a spatial layout, to use groupings to better enable recognition, and to move the tiles around on the screen should be a vast improvement over the Start menu. We believe this opens up a whole new world of organization and customization that will dramatically improve working with extremely large sets of apps and shortcuts.”
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.